Thursday, December 26, 2013

Despite having increased its installed base of renewable energy generation sources, Honduras is actually getting proportionally less energy from renewable sources than it previously was.

The result of this lower generation has been roving blackouts all across Honduras this year. This comes despite policies of the Lobo Sosa administration.

In 2010 they approved 47 renewable
energy projects, with a combined generation capacity of 750 megawatts. Only four of those projects have actually broken ground to begin
construction, and only one, a small hydroelectric project generating 12
megawatts, is actually operating.

From 2010 to 2013, Honduras saw a slight increase in installed capacity, from 1610 megwatts to 1734.9 megawatts. That's a 124.9 megawatt increase, nearly all of it because of a single wind power farm, Cerro Hule (102 megawatts), coming on line.

There was a slight increase in biomass generation by 2013 as well, from an installed capacity of 91.4 megawatts to 105.5 megawatts, primarily from sugar cane processing.

By installed capacity, in 2010 renewable sources represented 38.4% of the generating capacity of Honduras. In 2013 that had risen to 43.7% of installed capacity, as the director of SERNA reported earlier this year.

But despite representing almost 44% of the generating capacity, renewable installations actually generated only 40% of the power produced in Honduras this year.

Why was this?

There was an overall drop in power generation in Honduras between 2010 and 2013. In 2010, Honduras generated 6744.3 gigawatt hours of power. In 2013, it
generated 5898.8 gigawatt hours, a decrease of 845.5 gigawatt hours.

In 2010 hydroelectric plants generated 44.8% of the power used in Honduras. In 2013, only 33.7% of the power generated in Honduras came from hydroelectric, a drop of 11%. Total hydraulic generation dropped by nearly a third, from 3083.3 gigawatt hours in 2010 to 1999.1 gigawatt hours in 2013. Part of this is due to mismanagement of the El Cajón dam, built on the Comayagua River in the 1980s.

The amount of water in its reservoir has been lowered to reduce pressure on
the dam, which is reportedly leaking more than 2000 liters per second
through cracks that threaten to flood the turbine room. Reduced water
pressure means reduced production of electricity.

Another factor contributing to this decrease in hydroelectric generation is drought. Much of the southern half of the country has been experiencing a multi-year drought.

The renewable energy strategy of ENEE places a higher emphasis on hydroelectric projects than any other form of renewable energy. The majority of the 47 renewable energy projects approved in 2010 were hydroelectric projects, mostly small.

Honduras is at continuing risk for drought going forward, according to climate change maps.

Other types of renewable power would seem like better options for the future, and would lower the confrontations caused with local people-- often rural farmers, and in many cases indigenous people.

Unfortunately, when Honduras strikes out into renewable energy, it is just as likely to grant contracts to companies with no expertise.

So the hydroelectric projects that can be done with local resources keep on coming. But the power generated does not.

Monday, December 23, 2013

The lame duck Honduran Congress is now piling on taxes to try and make up for the last four years of spending as the Lobo Sosa administration prepares to give way to the presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández.

On Saturday, December 21, the Congress passed a new, extensive series of taxes and rule changes designed to bring up to 4000 million lempiras ($200 million) in new revenue to the government over the next year. The same measure imposes restrictions on the transfer of income between government branches that is expected to bring about a further 12000 million lempiras ($600 million) in savings.

Everyone will pay a new "special contribution" of 3% on all sales. This is on top of the already existing sales tax of 12%.

All customs tax exemptions (commonly used by religious institutions, businesses aimed at tourism, newspapers, and power generation companies) are cancelled. Telephone and cable television service will be subject to the 15% tax, but internet service will continue to be taxed at 12%.

Everyone except those given an exemption under legislation called the Regímenes Especiales de Importación y Turismo will pay a further 5% tax on taxable income greater than 1 million lempiras ($50,000).

Consumption taxes are in general regressive-- they disproportionately affect the poorest members of a population. In addition to the general impact that the Honduran poor will experience from the added special contribution tax, other aspects of the new law will sharply affect their use of energy.

Some consumers receive a subsidy on their electric service. Until now, that subsidy has been for those who consume less than 150 kw/month. From today forward, the subsidy will only be for those who consume 75 kw/month or less.

Gasoline will be taxed a further 5.3 lempiras/gallon ($0.25/gallon). The income is supposed to be earmarked for infrastructure and social welfare projects.

But the poor are not targeted by the new sweeping tax increases: property owners will see sharp increases in taxation as well.

The central government will retain 10% of the gains from the purchase or sale of property, bonds, rights, and titles as a capital gains tax. Dividends will be taxed at 10% as well.

Consumption and property transfer taxes make sense as policy because Honduras has a poor record of tax collection on basic income tax. But that doesn't mean income tax rates were left alone, either.

Foreign companies will pay a tax of 10% on gross income in Honduras. Honduran companies will pay 1.5% on their gross income over 3 million lempiras ($150,000) except if their business is selling cement, services given to the government, pharmaceuticals for human consumption, petroleum products, or supplies for baking, which will pay a tax of 0.75%.

The tax law also contemplates retaining more money for the central government at the expense of entities it owes fixed levels of funding.

The new law freezes the 2014 budget for the central government at 2013 levels. But it also changes how amounts specified in the constitution for other government entities, such as municipal governments and the National Autonomous University, are calculated. Some kinds of income that previously counted in calculating the amounts to transfer will be exempt from being counted now. This means that all dependencies specified as receiving a fixed percent of the government income will receive a budget cut, while the central government will retain more.

On top of all this, there is yet another revision to the security tax.

This revision extends the security tax to cover previously exempt bank accounts with deposits under 120,000 lempiras. Now, all savings and checking accounts will be taxed. COHEP, one of the principal business organizations in the country, warns that this might lead to capital flight.

So why is Congress doing this now?

Part of the answer is that Honduras simply has to find more revenue or the government cannot continue. And some of the answer is partisan politics, with a hand-off of government from one National Party president to another, something that has never happened since the new Honduran constitution was set in place in the 1980s. Even with the new taxes and savings envisioned under this law, it will
not close the fiscal deficit under which the government operates.

Right now the lame duck Congress has enough National Party members to pass anything they want, short of a constitutional amendment. The new Congress might not be so amenable. The National Party will not have sufficient representation to do what it wants. It will need to make alliances with other parties in order to enact legislation, making laws like this one difficult to pass.

Most of the Liberal Party members in the present Congress opposed the new taxes, and suggested that the press headline their coverage "National Party passes new taxes". The Liberal membership in the incoming Congress will be joined by LIBRE and PAC contingents that can also be expected to be less inclined to automatically agree with the ruling party's legislative direction

The Lobo Sosa government used 1.4 billion dollars in borrowing to make ends meet this year. Under the new tax law's projections, the increases will, at best, cover half of that.

It will be up to the next government to figure out how to cover the other half, while improving actual tax collection enough to cover those projections. And that is presumably why, along with changes in the leadership of the police and military, the first choices for government offices made by Juan Orlando Hernández included a new head of the Dirección Ejecutivo de Ingresos (Executive Office of Income), Miriam Guzman, reportedly already at work.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Porfirio Lobo Sosa is letting Juan Orlando Hernández start making changes in the Honduran government before he is sworn in this coming January, underlining the collaboration that exists between these two Partido Nacional administrations, while highlighting their differences in key changes in the police and military leadership.

On December 17, Lobo Sosa gave his Ministers until the end of the day to hand in their resignations so that Hernandez could install his choices once he made them. The first act was to shuffle the command in the police and military. The new holders of these positions have already been sworn in by Lobo Sosa today, with Hernández speaking at the ceremony.

Juan Carlos "Tigre" Bonilla is out. Ramon Antonio Sabillon Pineda is the new police commander. Sabillon previously was the commander of the special investigations division of the police.

Bonilla is rumored to have had differences with Arturo Corrales, the
Security Minister, who Hernández is considering keeping in that office.

Felix Villanueva Mejia will be the assistant director of the police. The preventative police will be headed by Javier Leopoldo Flores Milla, while Hernández will keep the current director of the transit police, Abencio Atilio Flores Morazán, in that position. The director of the investigative police (Dirección Nacional de Investigación Criminal) will be Jose Leandro Osorio. The special investigative police will be headed by Ruben Martel Garcia,while Hector Ivan Mejia will serve as director of the police academy. Abraham Flores Marcelino will be head of the police special unit, and José Leonel Enamorado will be the police commander of the joint military and police task force.

The high command of the Honduran Armed Forces was also changed significantly.

In the place of the current military commander, Rene Osorio Canales, will be Fredy Santiago Diaz Zelaya. In December Zelaya received his fifth star, along with Julian Pacheco Tinoco, who will remain as commander of the Military Intelligence service. Rigoberto Espinosa Posadas, who was promoted in December, will be second in command of the Honduran Joint Chiefs. Miguel Palacios Romero will be the military Inspector General. Jorge Alberto Fernández López will command the Air Force, and Héctor Orlando Caballero Espinoza will command the Navy.

Lobo Sosa also let Juan Orlando Hernández name and install his head of the Dirección Ejecutivo de Ingresos (DEI), the Honduran equivalent of the IRS.

This important government unit, which failed to meet its quotas all through the Lobo Sosa government, will be Miriam Guzman. She also has taken the reins of her government unit already.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Since the Honduran election ended, we have busy here: we captured the Tribunal Supremo Electoral's election results, and placed them, along with the Voto Social vote count, in a database.

That means we are in a position to analyze apparent voting pattern across the country. And there are some glaring anomalies in the voting.

None of these is more apparent than the case of voting in El Paraíso, Copan, where the voter turnout, according to the TSE numbers, was 85%. That would be exceptional participation, compared to previous Honduran elections, and is far above the average levels of participation in this election.

El Paraíso is an interesting place. Its Mayor, Alexander Ardon, is widely considered to be a member of the Sinaloa cartel in Honduras. In a report on organized crime in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, the Wilson Center reported:

Honduran police intelligence says that El Paraíso, Copan Mayor Alexander Ardon works with the Sinaloa Cartel. Ardon has built a town hall that resembles the White House, complete with a heliport on the roof, and travels with 40 heavily armed bodyguards. Cameras monitor the roads leading in and out of town, intelligence services say. And there are reports that the Mayor often closes the city to outsiders for big parties that include norteño music groups flown in from Mexico.

One correction: it's not just norteño music: it's narcocorridos that characterize the bands flown in to El Paraíso.

Voting was definitely distorted in El Paraíso on November 24th.

One election monitoring group reported that 50 election workers from out of town staying in a hotel were locked in the night before the election, surrounded by over 100 armed men who threatened to shoot them if they tried to leave the hotel and assume their poll duties. Another such group got out of the hotel, but were stopped along the way by armed men, who slashed their tires and told them if they continued onward, they'd be killed. The group in the hotel was freed late in the day on Nov. 24 by Officer Erazo Mejia of the police, but were later locked up in another place and their election credentials stolen.

Adrienne Pine has an account from one of these poll workers whose tires were slashed. The group waited until 4:40 AM for police to come and help them obtain new tires, then drove on to their polling places. This group were representatives of LIBRE. They were met at the polling place by a group of armed men who controlled the location, not the military, who they report just stood around. The LIBRE group was told it was not welcome there. Shortly thereafter there was an altercation between the local police and the armed group, which kicked out the police, then confiscated the identity cards and election credentials of all the LIBRE workers, before kicking them out. The armed group tried to get the LIBRE representatives to sign the ballot tally forms, at gunpoint, but at least some still refused, and all were thrown out of the polling place. At the doorway to the polling place they saw individuals questioning voters before they entered, and they report that if the prospective voters were not voting for Juan Orlando Hernández, they were not permitted in to vote.

LIBRE formally asked the TSE to invalidate the tally sheets from those precincts, but the TSE counted them. You can see one such acta here.

Here's how to read it. The polling station was issued 320 ballots. That means that there are 304 citizens eligible to vote there, plus up to 16 party representatives (which adds up to 320 ballots). In the vote count, they reported 308 valid votes, plus 16 nullified ballots, which is 324 ballots, four more than they were issued or should have needed.

Not only did the TSE count this acta, signed by 4 poll workers and two alternates (none of them LIBRE members): it ignored the over-vote.

This means that somehow, in the TSE's vote counting software, the check for more people voting than ballots issued either isn't implemented properly, isn't implemented at all, or someone at the TSE ignored the system to OK this acta.

Given the OAS report of its audit of the vote counting software, it is not unlikely that an over-vote test either wasn't implemented, or didn't work.

This tally sheet was not even subject to special scrutiny (escrutinio especial), or it would have been issued a new, less informative vote count sheet, looking like the one found here for acta 314.

Another example from the same region is MER 2670. They were issued 377 ballots to cover the 361 eligible votes plus 16 party representatives. They report the total ballots cast as 348. But the individual candidate's votes, plus blank and null votes, add up to 404! This would mean they had a voter turnout of 112%!

MER 2687 should have qualified for special scrutiny as well. Actas with similar mistakes were scrutinized and replaced elsewhere, but not in El Paraíso for some reason. The acta for MER 2687 reports 320 ballots issued for its 304 eligible votes plus up to sixteen party representatives. Six people signed the acta and on the line where they report how many people voted, they reported six. This acta, in reality, reports on 304 votes, including blank and null votes. Six of those votes were presumably by poll workers, so the effective turnout is 98%.

The TSE accepted "6" as the count of voters who voted and used it in counting how many
citizens voted, which means the numbers it reports for this MER are false.
Apparently the software does not check that the number of votes is equal
to the number of people who voted, a required sanity check for any such vote counting system.

MER 2691 also shows anomalies. They were issued 222 ballots for 206 eligible voters plus up to 16 poll workers. In total, 210 votes were reported cast, and six of those were by poll workers. That means that only 2 of the precinct's eligible voters supposedly didn't vote. That would be extraordinary.

MER 2693 shows the same issue. They were issued 179 ballots for 163 eligible voters plus up to 16 poll workers. They report 166 votes, and only 5 poll workers voted, meaning that only 2 of their eligible voters didn't vote. The same can be said about MERs 2711, 2712, and 2713.

Voter turnouts in the 80-100% range should be suspect.

No poll watchers reported such extremely high turnouts anywhere in Honduras.

Only 36.1% (n=17) MER in El Paraíso reported a voter turnout of less than 85%. If we set the threshold lower, to 75%-- still a great turnout level for Honduras-- then only 27% (n = 13) had voter turnouts less than 75%.

These are extraordinary levels of voter participation.

Extraordinary-- and suspect under any circumstances. But not troubling to the TSE in Honduras.

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Arturo Corrales has cut off Honduras's Observatorio de Violencia from its ability to get crime statistics from the police and coroners in Honduras.

Julietta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University, says that Corrales has obstructed the Observatorio from getting statistics for the last 6 months of this year. Castellanos observed that the Observatorio:

"was created in 2003 and never have we had any restriction on access to the information; the procedures and methodology for the construction of the data were a validation process done by the University, the Public Prosecutor's office, and the Secretary of Security."

The power struggle between an administration that desperately wants to make the homicide statistics look better, and the Observatorio de Violencia, that wants to transparently report on the statistics, was made clear in October, when both the government and the Observatorio released their homicide statistics for the first half of 2013.

They differed on the number of murders by about a thousand.

At that time Corrales made the argument that it was proper to change the way Honduras reports homicides to conform to the standard way the Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo counts homicides. This procedure is particularly maladapted to the Honduran situation. It calls for a determination of homicide only when both police and a coroner agree on a verdict of homicide.

In Honduras, few homicide victims are examined by a coroner. Coroners only operate in the major cities (Tegucigalpa, San Pedro Sula) so for there to be a determination by a coroner, the body would have to be taken from where the individual was killed, to one of these morgues. That simply doesn't happen, for cultural and financial reasons. Most Hondurans reclaim the body from the police within 24 hours and bury it within 48 hours of death. The existing coroners have trouble keeping up with the volume of urban homicides. But violent death is not limited to these cities.

So requiring both a police and a coroner's report predictably would lower Honduras' reported murder rate, even though nothing has actually changed.

and continued that he often used to hear of 20-35 deaths a day, but now it seldom breaks single digits.

That is, obviously, no justification not to make the data requested by the Observatorio de Violencia public. The reasons for obscuring it are purely political.

The government claims homicides are down, and wants to show a big reduction. However, the way they're now counting homicides is incompatible with the way the rate was determined in past years, so whatever they choose to announce is actually meaningless. Numbers calculated using a new method cannot be used to establish a pattern with respect to previous homicide rates.

As Migdonia Ayestas, head of the Observatorio de Violencia toldProceso Digital:

"we cannot play with the citizenry saying that violence has diminished when we have seen that daily there are multiple crimes."

Caritas, the Catholic charity, also issued a statement lamenting the obfuscation and calling on Corrales to cease obstructing the Observatorio's access to information.

Proceso Digital seems to agree. It closes its article:

Ever since Arturo Corrales assumed the reins of the Secretary of Security, in one way or another they have hidden the violent death statistics from the press and the citizens in general.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Honduras has yet to place an offering of the final $250 million dollars in government bonds authorized by Decreto 183-2012 of November, 2012 in a foreign capital market, but already Congress is modifying it to authorize the placement of even more government bonds to finance current expenditures.

Through Decreto 183-2012 the Honduran Congress authorized the sale of up to $750 million dollars in government bonds, placed in domestic or foreign capital markets. In the spring of this year, they successfully offered $500 million dollars of that in bonds that had slightly more than 7% interest. However, when they sought to place the remaining $250 million dollars in government bonds this summer, they found the interest rate had risen to above 10% and withdrew the offer. They have announced that they intend to try again this month to sell the last $250 million in bonds, hoping for a better interest rate.

But acting rapidly yesterday, the Honduran Congress, reportedly without dissent, amended the original bill to authorize up to $1 billion dollars in bonds, an increment of a further $250 million, because it has become clear that the original amount will not meet the financial needs of the Lobo Sosa government.

Honduras owed about $4.8 billion dollars at the start of the Zelaya Rosales administration, when it qualified for debt relief under the Initiative for Highly Indebted Poor Countries and received a total of $3.5 billion in relief. That left it a foreign debt of about $1.3 billion dollars.

As of September this year, Honduras's foreign debt was back up to $5.68 billion dollars. $842 million of that increase occurred just this year. La Tribuna reports that for 2013 so far, the debt incurred ($1.496 billion) is about 3.2 times the government income for the same period ($455 million).

"The first difficulty that this government has is how to pay its salary obligations to about 205 million government employees....this is a problem for this [the Lobo Sosa] government and it's a problem that the next government will inherit."

That's why Congress is authorizing more bonds to meet the current obligations of the Lobo Sosa government. But Navarro continues:

"The other real problem of the next government is how to negotiate the expiration of the bonds the government has with private financial institutions, like banks and pension systems; the government currently has no way to pay off this internal debt."

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Radio Progreso, a project of the Jesuit organization ERIC (the Equipo de Reflexión, Investigación, y Comunicación) located in El Progreso, Yoro, has a commentary on their website with insight from a number of Honduran commentators about where the post-election phase is headed. It starts:

Two weeks after the general elections, their results continue to be the object of critique for the suspicious way in which the count of votes in the local polling places developed and the filling out of the actas electorales (vote tallies).

Then it moves to a series of comments from Honduran perspectives. The most intriguing of these is the perspective of the new student movement, the so-called Camisas Negras or Movimiento anti JOH. This is the group whose protests in Tegucigalpa were met with immediate suppression by the military police in the days after the vote.

Radio Progreso quotes Marcos Rubí, a member of this movement, on its origins and aims:

"it grew in the heat of what pretended to be an electoral fiesta, with university students that from before the beginning of the process already had seen certain anomalies, certain signs of fraud, and then in the electoral process of Sunday the 24th, now that the fraud was confirmed, indignation grew and we decided to organize ourselves... The Movement is heterogeneous, there are ideologies involved that run from the right to the extreme left, but there is a consensus that there was fraud and we all have the same purpose".

The disillusionment of students with the electoral process has been under-reported in the international press. University students took the place formerly occupied by representatives of the church in this election, as custodians for the individual election polling places. That means they were witnesses to the most egregious irregularities: the selling of party credentials, voter intimidation and mis-information-- irregularities international observers dismissed as minor, but that these Honduran youths (in our view, rightly) saw as shocking and unacceptable.

Honduran sociologist Eugenio Sosa criticizes the Tribunal Supremo Electoral, and was blunt about the possible impact of challenges to the TSE: "I believe
that the results will stand, the Tribunal has announced them and it
isn't going to reverse itself even though they will make a pretense of
reviewing the actas":

"I believe that the Tribunal, despite having launched itself affirming that these were the most transparent elections and despite having all the backing of official organizations such as the OAS, EU, the US Embassy and Department of State, little by little has been showing aspects that demonstrate that in these elections there were as many problems, irregularities, and alteration of results as in the primaries."

Hermilo Soto, national coordinator in Honduras for the Lutheran World Federarion, characterizes reforming the electoral system as a "great challenge" for Honduras going forward, because "the great problem that we have today is that the people do not trust in the present institutionality directing the electoral process".

The article notes that Congress will play a key role in determining whether and how the electoral system might be revised, as well as having a key role to play in the subsequent elections of the Supreme Court and Ministerio Público.

As we have noted previously, no single party has a large enough delegation to congress to control these processes. Radio Progreso quotes the opinion of Antonio Rivera Callejas, a re-elected Partido Nacional congress member, about what may happen:

"It's too early to talk about the composition of the junta directiva (executive committee), that is going to be defined in January, I figure, you should remember that there will be many political factions making up the congress, there will not be a simple ajority for any of the political parties, this is going to require the consensus of many... What there is not yet are concrete names, of candidates for the presidency, vicepresidency, and secretariat [of the congress], so it is normal that there are conversations among all the political parties but that will take a concrete form only in the month of January".

Sociologist Armando Orellana is skeptical of the vision of harmonious consensus advanced by Rivera, and raises instead warnings of backroom deals and corruption as usual in the negotiation of a congressional majority:

"The party of the government [Partido Nacional] is buying consciences, there has been talk of payments of up to five million lempiras [about $240,000] to procrue the presidency of the Congreso Nacional. The ally that it has had during this period [the Lobo Sosa administration] has been the Partido Liberal, nevertheless they are not going to succeed in controlling the two-thirds majority necessary to manage constitutional reforms"

This is a critical point: many of the more alarming legislative initiatives under the Hernández Congress required constitutional amendments, which sailed through with unprecedented ease due to the alliance between the two dominant parties.

Radio Progreso cites Orellana's observation that LIBRE and PAC could, along with smaller parties (such as PINU and UD) form a large enough block that, with a few Partido Liberal congress members acting more independently they could push congress in a different direction.

While Antonio Rivera dismisses this, his argument for a more centralized authority in Congress-- which is that the hegemony and harmony under Juan Orlando Hernández was critical to the legislation that the current congress passed-- actually cuts both ways: for those who question the wisdom of such rapid, unreflective passage of major changes to the legal and economic framework of Honduras, slowing down the process may be the best outcome of this election.

And Radio Progreso's coverage suggests that the incoming Congress will operate not only with internal dissent, but with the scrutiny of a newly mobilized younger generation of Hondurans whose outrage about the way the election was conducted is unlikely to be settled simply because the international community declares that this election was good enough, if not really as good as it could have been.

Friday, December 6, 2013

The independent digital initiative that was formed to publically recount the published Actas from the website of the Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) of Honduras, Voto Social, has sent out an email to participants in the distributed project of verifying the data on the Actas they grabbed (15,637 Actas, just under 97% of the total). Their website currently says 83.03% of those Actas have been verified by three people.

In their email, the founders of this independent project summarize what they have achieved in the review of the presidential vote count. I copy below the precise language from their email about what they have and have not succeeded in doing.

On the success side: they have demonstrated that the scanned Actas "presented results different from the official ones". As they note, the totals on their website keep the positions of the candidates the same.

They go on to explicitly note that

the possibility that the Actas might be false continues to be open. Up to now, 10 false Actas have been reported (they were test Actas that in some way were in the system) and were corrected by the TSE, for transparency, we are keeping a copy of both versions of the images of the Actas.

The demonstration of flaws in the vote counting process by this project, and by the take-overs of the TSE software by Anonymous of Honduras, should concern everyone watching this race. It isn't enough to say "the outcome wouldn't have changed". The organizers of Voto Social don't feel that is the point of their project: they emphasize the desire on the part of the Honduran community for "transparency".

Honduran voters had a right to expect their votes to be counted accurately. The TSE clearly has failed that test. There are still questions about Actas that were not published on the TSE website; the TSE never acknowledged it was correcting its count; it has simply asserted that it was correct. That is the opposite of transparency.

What Voto Social cannot do, that would make a difference for the goal of transparency, is to examine the concerns raised about the Actas not accurately reflecting the votes cast and the intentions of voters who showed up at individual polling places. The most serious concerns expressed there have been, and continue to be, about the effect of buying of credential from smaller parties by Partido Nacional representatives, giving them more places at the local voting tables where the ballots were actually counted.

It bears repeating, because it is something that the international community seems not to really be acknowledging: the TSE count of Actas can be reviewed, independently checked, even recounted, without ever resolving whether, as ballots came out of boxes and were grouped on tables surrounded by disproportionate numbers of advocates for one party, the true distribution of votes was represented.

How many voting places saw incidents like the one reported by LIBRE representatives at the Minerva School in El Paraíso, in the Department of Copan? How much did incidents like these, unwitnessed by international observers, affect the numbers reported on the Actas-- whether those were entered accurately or inaccurately?

They tried to intimidate me at gunpoint to sign the tally sheets and
ballots before leaving the table, which I did not agree to, and finally
they forced me to give them my electoral worker credential and national
identity card. We managed to leave the community. In the door of the
school there were people asking voters whom they planned to vote for,
and if it was not for the National Party candidate they simply were not
allowed to enter.

As long as the parties run the local vote counts, transparency will remain elusive in Honduran elections. It is clear that the international community will endorse the election of the candidate of the Partido Nacional: what is unclear is whether it will exercise any pressure to push Honduras to move further away from the electoral system that leaves the people of the country without trust in elections.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Readers of English language media may have seen stories quoting a press release from the Tribunal Supremo Electoral claiming that LIBRE failed to follow through yesterday on an agreement about starting the review of the Actas in the disputed presidential election.

But just reporting the TSE's press release is neither the whole story, nor is it accurate.

You are unlikely to have seen any reporting on LIBRE's response to the TSE press release, which is that David Matamoros, head of the TSE, was mistaken when he said the process of recounting the votes would begin yesterday, because there has been no agreement as to the procedures to be used for the process.

According to Matamoros, the process of rescanning the original tally sheets (Actas) to compare them with the scanned images in the TSE election counting system and contrast them with the certified versions of the Actas under LIBRE party control was supposed to begin yesterday.

But in this procedure, there's no mechanism for a recount or handling suspected errors, only comparing versions of the Actas. Nor was there a procedure for handling the 2000+ actas for which there are no scanned images, but for which the TSE has recorded vote counts.

Oscar Rivera, the elections overseer for LIBRE, toldProceso Digital that LIBRE indeed met with the TSE on Tuesday to arrange for the recount. The TSE representatives presented a proposal for the way to proceed with the recount, but said if LIBRE was not in agreement, for them to propose an alternative.

Rivera said

We received the proposal and the same night (Tuesday evening) we gave a formal reply to the Tribunal in which we asked for other mechanisms to assure the Honduran people that Honduran democracy would be respected and that the TSE was a serious [professional] organization, but with the reply that they gave us, they haven't convinced us.

They
haven't said what they will do when an Acta contains anomalies and we
asked that if an Acta is inconsistent in some way, that they recount the
votes [in that ballot box].

Oscar Rivera went on to note that there were other mechanisms that LIBRE could use in the election law to get the Actas validated. He noted that they were awaiting a formal reply from the TSE magistrates that addressed their request of December 2, not the unilateral approach presented by the TSE in their press release.

So, for the moment, a recount is in a holding pattern while the TSE and LIBRE negotiate a process acceptable to both.

Monday, December 2, 2013

This morning Xiomara Castro and the LIBRE Party filed a formal set of complaints about the vote counting process and its lack of transparency, documenting errors and discrepancies in the formal counting of the tally sheets of the over 16,000 Mesas Electorales Receptoras (MER).

LIBRE representative Ricki Moncada then read the document to the assembled press.

The Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE) head David Matamoros agreed to a public recount of the Actas: not the votes themselves, just a recount of the votes as recorded on the tally sheets.

This, of course, is a compromise. Ballot boxes will not be re-opened; individual votes will not be recounted.

It's a vexing compromise because some of the problems that LIBRE alleges include alteration of the Actas themselves, which they say they can document.

Remember that the election procedures gave the political parties a number of ways to get copies of the scanned/reported Acta at each step. The party representative at every MER was supposed to be given a copy of the scanned Acta to take back to the party. Once the scanned Acta hit the TSE's computers, a copy was supposed to be sent to each party, and to the foreign vote auditors.

LIBRE says it has Actas sent to them by the TSE with scan dates of the early morning hours of the election day, bearing data that looks like the test data used to validate the system in earlier runs. LIBRE also says they have copies of Actas that don't match the Acta image in the TSE central computing database, with different signatures and vote tallys.

Since the election itself on November 24, there has been a public recount of
the scanned actas going on at this site:
http://conteo.votosocial.org. In addition, there has been a Facebook-coordinated effort to identify Actas that contain problematic
information or were mis-recorded in the TSE's vote counting system.

Through these independent projects, more than 1600 problematic Actas had been identified by Saturday, November 30.

There is a further 2000+ Actas which the TSE has "sequestered" because of unspecified problems, for which vote counts, and images, have not been released. Then there are a series of MERs for which vote totals are recorded, but no Acta image is posted.

I have been involved in the public recount of the Actas, entering the values from the scanned images of the Actas into a system that then recounts the votes once 3 separate reviews of the transcription agree that the data are correct. I also have reviewed Actas flagged on the Facebook page as problematic. I can say first-hand that I found inconsistencies in more than 500 Actas I've reviewed over the last week.

Some of the inconsistencies were transcription errors: the TSE had an enormous problem going from the hand-written numbers to recording those numbers in their MS-SQL database. Over time, the TSE seemed to be correcting these transcription errors, though in a non-transparent fashion since they never acknowledged a single one of them. Many still remained as of this past Saturday.

More troubling, though, is that the vote totals on far too many Actas added up to more than the number of people who were reported to have voted in that particular MER.

Each Acta contains a field "Ciudadanos que votaron", which the TSE training manual documented as being calculated by taking the total number of ballots at the start of voting, and subtracting the number of blank ballots remaining at the end of voting. The starting number of ballots and the calculated "Ciudadanos que votaron" are recorded on the official tally sheet. The total number of votes being reported on the tally sheet should add up to the number of "Cuidadanos que votaron" but very frequently it does not. Based on my experience of trying to review the results, minor errors of 1, 2, and 3 over-votes are common, while over-votes of 50 or more happen less often.

Reviewing and recounting the Actas alone will not correct these over-votes. They merely become enshrined in the result.

The public vote count shows results that differ from the TSE count, though not enough to change the outcome of the election. But there are still 4.4% of the Actas which cannot be validated because the TSE released no image of them. This is enough to affect the margin between the two leading candidates, which might reflect the tighter race that most observers expected.

Then there's the issue of database security. Anonymous Honduras has twice penetrated the vote counting center, and currently (late afternoon on December 2) has replaced the TSE's main web page with their own. Their penetration made it clear they could have easily, and invisibly, changed the results in favor of any candidate they wanted to. From details like their ability to show administrative tables, it seems that they had complete control over the database, and the TSE was apparently none the wiser.

So, there will be some sort of a recount of the Actas, with representatives of the political parties present to agree that the data entered into the system is what is on the Acta. The TSE has no idea what the procedures will be, or how they will do this, but something will happen.

It's a step in the direction of transparency. But not the kind of recount that would put to rest, ultimately, the kinds of doubts that have been raised.

Friday, November 29, 2013

On Friday, La Prensaconnected the dots on the new Congress, quoting statements from Xiomara Castro that suggest LIBRE party leadership is (while pursuing complaints of irregularities and inconsistencies in the official vote count) moving on to the next stage: functioning as a major opposition party in a new, multi-party political landscape.

Castro... pointed out that LIBRE has converted itself into an "important political force" by the number of congress-members that it gained in the unicameral Congress, made up of 128 members.

"We broke the chains of two-party rule, today we are located in the first place, today we have demonstrated that the people fought and will fight for the platform of LIBRE".

As previously noted, the Partido
Nacional is projected to have 47 congress members; Libre will have 39; the Partido
Liberal will have 26; and Salvador Nasralla's Partido Anticorrupción is expected to have 13 congress members, with the final three falling, one each, to the long-established smaller parties: PINU, the Christian Democrats, and the Partido de Unificación Democrática.La Prensa adds a contrast with the existing congress that is worth quoting:

In the present Congress, presided over and absolutely controlled by Hernández, the Partido Nacional has 71 diputados, the
Partido Liberal 55, and the other three minority parties shared
12 seats, which had given total control to the conservative binomial that has governed this country for more than a century.

La Prensa is clearly anticipating less total control over the incoming government. That leads us to consider possibilities. LIBRE/PN coalitions seem unlikely (although some press reports earlier this week contained speculation about such an alliance).

“The ideal is if there exists an agreement with all the political parties, but in any case the natural alliance that the nacionalistas could make is with the Partido Liberal”.

Pineda Alvarado is an ex-congress member for the Partido Nacional. So his comments give us insight into the pragmatic approach we might expect from within his party. His views are echoed by a re-elected Partido Nacional congress member, Antonio Rivera Callejas, who says that the PN could make alliances with the more "democratic" part of the Partido Liberal.

Rivera alludes to the marked division between the present day Liberal congess members, some of whom have stayed in line with the presidential candidate, Mauricio Villeda, and the other that has had more affinity with LIBRE. In the case of the first 26 virtually elected congress members, many of them re-elected, all belong to the first group, that is to say, they are "villedistas”.

Thus, we can expect an attempt to form a coalition of the two traditional parties on one side, with a possible 73 votes giving it a majority in Congress. Partido Nacional commentators add the three single representatives of the small parties, projecting 76 votes.

But that presumes that the entire Liberal party delegation does not see advantage in using its seats more flexibly, to advance its own political projects.

Earlier today, La Prensa suggested that the Partido Anti-Corrupción will form an alliance with LIBRE, in opposition to the two major parties. Despite ideological differences, both parties were mainly motivated by rejection of the existing power structure, which both characterized as fundamentally corrupt. Quoting PAC member (and projected congress member) Virgilio Padilla, La Prensa wrote

We believe that the opposition has to plan a block that can oppose the officialism of the government, and that can only be an alliance constructed with the Partido Liberal, Libre and PAC... We are disposed to establish an alliance that will defend Honduras, an alliance that represents the interests of Honduras, an alliance that will impede intervention in the Judicial Branch, because if the Partido Nacional is going to control all the powers of State, impunity is going to continue.

Salvador Nasralla, the presidential candidate, is said not to have ruled out any alliance, but La Prensa concludes alliance with the Partido Nacional is unlikely.

A three-way alliance would give LIBRE-PAC-Partido Liberal control of congress with 78 votes.

LIBRE and PAC alone would not be able to form a majority, with 52 votes. But they could make it much less simple for the Partido Nacional to pass its legislative agenda, even if they did not have formal support from the Partido Liberal.

Which more or less means that the husk of the Liberal Party, presided over by Mauricio Villeda, may have more power as a losing party than Villeda would have had if elected president with a minority of the national vote.

@HondurasCultPol this is what I do. Report the findings of the intnal observers, the official results and wait.

As we added: we are fine with you waiting. Not so fine with the press setting the timeline for action.

Here's the issue for us: the TSE should be providing accurate counts. The international community is acting as if the TSE is providing accurate counts. So the approach is: prove these aren't the real numbers.

There are ongoing efforts to do just that. We are doing our own analysis, and have found that there are discrepancies with at least 500 actas so far.

Whether these errors result in a systematic undercount of LIBRE and/or PAC votes, or systematically add votes to the Partido Nacional, is not clear yet. Getting this kind of convincing, systematic documentation takes time.

We don't expect Alberto Arce, or any other reporter, to claim fraud. We just would hope that the international press could be a little more nuanced in reporting this story. If you are used to European or US electoral systems, it is hard to give credence to how things are done in Honduran elections-- to the essential fragility of the vote count system.

The TSE needs this long to tally part of the vote; demanding that the proof of inconsistencies be presented faster than the TSE counts can seem like taking sides to those frustrated by the process itself. And yes, that will make people in Honduras suspicious and critical of the press.

[Anonymous Honduras published this image in its Twitter account in which it shows that the Tribunal Supremo Electoral did not count in the official results 80 votes obtained by LIBRE, according to the acta registering the data from the voting center of the polling place at the Escuela
Ramón Amaya Amador in La Lima, Cortés.]

[followers of this cybernetic organization that acted clandestinely placed images of actas and the official tables of results that do not agree with the data.]

Separately, Tiempo reports that another hacker published details for accessing the database. They quote their own IT specialist, José Carlos Ramos saying that

the hackers are trying to demonstrate that the system of the TSE doesn't have the necessary security measures. "If it is the way the hackers say, the data base can be accessed from any place in Honduras or the world... It could be consulted and modified by a user that had access privileges from someplace outside the Tribunal."

Needless to say, this is not good news for those who would like the TSE count to be accepted as official and accurate. And it is not good news for Hondurans in general who turned out for this historic election.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Like many others, we have been waiting to hear what the effects would be on the Honduran Congreso Nacional would be from the high voter turnout and extremely split voting evident in the presidential election.

According to El Heraldo, the Partido Nacional has lost control of the congress, retaining only 47 seats. While that is the largest delegation, it is nowhere near a majority of the 128 seat body.
Even though some results have not been tallied, and the Partido Nacional delegation may grow, it is not projected to have a majority. If Juan Orlando Hernández intends to govern, he and his party will have to work with others.

And if others don't want to cooperate, they can form their own coalitions and control congress-- the body which, ironically, has concentrated power continuously under the leadership of Hernández.

The Partido Liberal, traditionally the other powerhouse, will end up with 26 congress members.

But it is the two new parties that have made a really astonishing showing. There was no necessary connection to be assumed between the presidential and congressional elections; ballots for each are separate, and it could easily have been the case that a voter would reject the traditional party candidate for president (as a majority did reject Hernández) and still give their votes to the congress member of that party.

So it reflects a broader strength of LIBRE that it has the second largest congressional delegation, with 39 members. And, as El Heraldo notes, the real surprise was the strength of the Partido Anti-Corrupción, which will participate in the new congress with 13 members.

Three other long-established small parties, the Christian Democrats, the left-leaning Partido de Unificación Democrática, and PINU, each are projected to have a single delegate in congress.

We can do no better than to quote the conclusion drawn by El Heraldo:

The results of the 2013 general elections break with the hegemony that has been maintained in the last 32 years of democracy by the Partido Nacional and Partido Liberal, and LIBRE and PAC have converted themselves into two new political forces that will have a counterweight in approving the laws and decisions that the new Congress will take.

While it may seem like little consolation to the myriads of LIBRE voters who truly think they won at the polls, only to see the TSE count emerge otherwise, having such a strong presence in Congress has put LIBRE, in its first foray into national politics, into a place from which to argue for changes in the direction the country has been headed.

That makes Honduras worth continued international attention as the new government takes over in January, and for the rest of the four year term until the next election.

The OAS audit of the TSE's software was accurate in its concerns: the vote counting part is turning out to be less than perfect.

Observers have noted several anomalies, some of which have been corrected, and others of which have not. Here's an example that was still visible in the system as of this morning.

Consider the following screenshot (from the TSE's website here) taken at 1:19 pm today. Click on the image for a larger version.

This shows the scanned Acta for MER 3311 of the Escuela Leonardo Aguilar Oseguera school voting site in San Pedro Sula. On the left is the scanned Acta; on the right are the vote totals that the TSE credited to each candidate for this MER.

Precisely how those vote totals enter the system is unclear from TSE-provided information. Are the handwritten Actas submitted to an automatic optical character recognition system (ReadIRIS was mentioned in one TSE story about the vote counting system) or are the tallies entered by someone reading and entering the values for each candidate?

In either case, the vote total listed for Nasralla on the TSE website is only 3 votes, not the 103 votes listed on the tally sheet.

We are not alleging any mischief here (although that's possible). Rather, this is precisely the kind of sloppiness the OAS audit of the software used led us to expect.

This Acta should have failed the software confidence checks (because the number of votes in the tallies does not match the number of votes allegedly cast in this MER). But it either wasn't flagged by the system supposed to catch such inconsistencies (it should have detected as an under vote), or else a human intervened and OK'd the result: human error.

In either case the erroneous numbers were submitted to the vote tallying system with these inconsistencies and were tallied, giving Salvador Nasralla of the PAC party 100 fewer votes than he actually received from this mesa.

These are all officially approved tallies, officially approved errors, not
the Actas sequestered for inconsistencies. An Acta does not appear on
the website if it hasn't been included in the vote totals, so the TSE thinks there's no problem with this one.

We beg to differ.

This is just a single example of the kinds of errors we are seeing in the vote totals publicly provided by the TSE. The sad part is that it is not unique. There are many similar kinds of errors visible in the Actas posted on the TSE website.

The software audit by the OAS said the vote totaling system did not meet international standards for such systems and needed a lot more work (and a reimplementation) to do so. It looks like the TSE went ahead and used this poor quality software, which would mean it should independently audit all of the Actas and vote totals for consistency and sanity (meaning, are the numbers reported consistent with the number of voters in a specific mesa) before declaring anyone a winner.

Other errors that were apparent earlier are now systematically being corrected, so it will not surprise me if by the time this blog entry is published, the errors I know about (including the one above) have been made to disappear.

But it is these kinds of failings, and silent corrections without acknowledging the failings, that reduce public confidence in the TSE and its official results, leading people like Salvador Nasralla and Manuel Zelaya Rosales, ask for a public, open, recount of the official Actas before the TSE declares a winner.

A public recount of the Actas would go a long way to providing confidence that everyone is adding up the same numbers to get the same vote totals, which frankly would improve public perception of the TSE.

Without that, no matter how many international observers say the process on Sunday was legitimate, there will remain large segments of the Honduran people who believe that the process after Sunday was not.

Monday, November 25, 2013

(I will admit to a bias here: as a sometimes-quantitative social scientist, two places to the right of the decimal point on things like this always make me think: false precision! and never more so than when we are dealing with a deeply problematic process of adding numbers from, essentially, emails.)

The margin between the reported leading candidates got a little closer (in percentage) and a little wider (in votes): 98,881 votes now separate Juan Orlando Hernández and Xiomara Castro, with his percentage now closer to 34% and hers almost up to 29%:

There are reports, sometimes garbled in the English language coverage, that cite the fact that the TSE is concealing or suppressing the numbers from 20% of the tallies. This can be traced to the statements of Enrique Reina, the designado of the LIBRE party, last night, contained in LIBRE's press statement:

The data that the TSE has released are not sufficient to indicate a trend, owing to the fact that more than 20% of the total tallies in its power have not been counted owed to supposed anomalies.

there exist differences of more than 20% that do not coincide with the [counts] announced and that could change the outcome... they have slowed the sending of the official counts in which LIBRE is winning to set back the count to their advantage ... the TSE does the same by not counting talleys in which we won and that strangely have been scanned with the end turned over to hide the number and they are those that are being sent for auditing...What we know is that the tallies of the departments in which our numbers indicate a great advantage have not been counted or are being detained for reasons that we do not know.

The same points were reiterated by José Manuel Zelaya today, speaking on behalf of the party.

It may seem to outside observers that these objections are simply sour grapes. But the reality of elections in Honduras makes it imperative that all the votes are tallied, because manipulation of results in counting does occur.

In 2009, the original reported turnout was widely hailed as a major victory. In the end, the numbers came down, as the TSE completed counting. A few English-language media corrected their original, hasty stories (which were accurate reports of what the TSE was saying) but most did not.

With a reported 20% of ballot box summaries having "anomalies" requiring them to be validated before being added to the total count, all it takes is for those ballot boxes to be systematically skewed to have official results not match real voting.

The Tribunal Supremo Electoral has tallied approximately 54% of the national vote, they told us last night before suspending work until later today.

Their website-- not always accessible-- is posting preliminary numbers by Departamento (state, for North Americans).

Looking over those numbers, albeit preliminary, we are struck by the report for Cortés-- the Departamento in which is located San Pedro Sula, second-largest city and industrial capital of the country.

These show Salvador Nasralla of the Partido Anti-Corrupción leading with 35.1% of the vote.

LIBRE is in second place, with 23.46% of the votes.

The Partido Nacional is in the third place with 22.15%.

The Liberal Party is down at 18.8%

That strikes us as very, very odd. There was at least one report from an electoral mesa yesterday that said LIBRE votes were being reported as PAC votes. But that would take a lot of votes to be shifted: PAC is said to have 122,362 votes to LIBRE's 81,796.

The total for Cortés is only up to about 350,000 votes. Only 168,863 of those votes come from San Pedro Sula, so there is obviously room for change here.

But it still calls our attention to see PAC seeming to lead, not only in Cortés, but in San Pedro Sula itself (with 36.42% of the counted votes).

The margin dividing the two top candidates is quite small: 249,660 to 202,501-- so less than 50,000 votes separate LIBRE and the Partido Nacional. The eligible electorate is 5.3 million.

Does this tell us who will win? no, it does not. We do not know which results are included; there is no way to project from likely voting patterns in areas already counted to other similar areas.

Long before the TSE broadcast these partial counts, the Honduran press owned by supporters of Hernández was calling the election for him, based on exit polling by Ingenieria Gerencial. This is the same firm that did polling for the Partido Nacional, those private polls that were alluded to during the campaign but never published.

Meanwhile, LIBRE, relying on other exit polls, saw its candidate emerging as the winner. Without a newspaper ready to declare Xiomara Castro the winner, this would only matter if you were someone (like us) who expects exit polls in Honduras to be inherently unreliable-- and thus expect contradictory results.

Before the TSE circulated their preliminary counts, Xiomara Castro announced that she has been elected; on twitter, the statement read

Con los resultados que he recibido de boca de urna de todo el país, puedo decirles: Soy la Presidenta de Honduras. [With the results that I have received from the edge of the ballotbox from throughout the country, I can say to you: I am the President of Honduras.]

This at least should serve to prevent all the Honduran press from prematurely calling the election for Hernández. Of course, it also has opened Castro up to critique from pundits nationally and internationally.

I analyzed the exit poll data with an adjusted turnout model and got
31.5% to 31% in favor of Hernandez, well within any margin of error.

Except for the absolute number (we were kicking around 34-35% in discussions internally) that sounds about right to us: two diametrically opposed candidates separated by a threadbare margin. Not 6%-- this election should turn on 1-2% of the final vote count.

Two newly trained election participants belonging to the Carbon Cooperative of the National Council of Rural Workers were shot and killed last night in Cantarranas, returning from election training:

Maria Amparo Pineda Duarte was the elected President of the Cooperative.
Julio Ramon Maradiaga was an active member. The community is the site
of an ongoing land struggle in the area, and both victims were active
members in the LIBRE party.

The broadcasters at Radio Globo (to whom we are listening) are reporting that their transmitter has been surrounded by the military. Anyone who remembers 2009 should find that worrisome: direct attacks on the media facilities to stop them from transmitting were part of the strategies of the Michelletti regime

The announcer is quoted: “We have not requested this [military]
presence. They want to use this to pressure us and shut us up, but Radio
Globo will be on the air, whatever it takes…”

HSN Note: Radio Globo was one of the few media outlets to refuse to
sign the “Media Pact,” in which major media outlets essentially gave up
their right to contradict government pronouncements on the election. ...

They have a partial transcription (see below) that can be translated as follows:

Radio Globo denounces at this moment, on the point of 6:20 AM, that military authorities arrived beginning last night at the Cerrro de Canta Gallo, where the transmission equipment for Radio Globo and Channel 11 is installed, media that did not agree to the media gag that the TSE tried to impose on the country.

Since last night the military has taken the installations where the transmission antennas of Radio Globo, Globo TV and Channel 11 are. We cannot be silent in the face of this new outrage by the Armed Forces of Honduras.

A sad reminder of how on the 28th of June of 2009 the military assaulted the installations, throwing acid, breaking cables and gates in order to leave Radio Globo off the air.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

The normally open borders of Honduras with its neighbors are only partly open this week. Venacio Cervantes, head of Immigration, said yesterday that the borders are open, but that foreigners must justify their trip into Honduras at this time. "All entrances will be controlled," said the retired General.

Actually, he said a lot more: "All hotheads and national and foreign agitators who promote boycotting the election will be neutralized".

Today, he was ordered by Porfirio Lobo Sosa to stop, after
two separate incidents of harassment of foreign election observers were
reported by domestic and foreign press.

Cervantes reportedly said that he was

not going to permit disorder from [those] that come to slow down the electoral process, and those hotheads who want to protest and make unrest and confusion; the armed forces will proceed in accordance with all that's legal and we shall be forceful in the application of the law.

Unfortunately, the "hotheads" he thought would be slowing the electoral process included duly accredited election observers-- on whom any hope of this election being seen as transparent rests.

The earliest incident happened Friday, Nov. 22. ERIC, the Equipo de Reflexión Investigación y Comunicación, a Jesuit organization long established in Honduras, had its offices in El Progresso, Yoro, raided by Immigration police from the town. They entered a room where over 100 foreign election observers had just finished receiving training from a Tribunal Supremo Electoral official, and demanded that the Guatemalans, Salvadorans, US Citizens, and Canadians that made up the group present their TSE accreditation documents.

They also ordered the leader of the group, Alexis Lanza, to bring everyone down to the nearest Immigration office for unstated reasons.

Honduran Immigration police have no authority to enforce the election law, nor have they been formally asked to do so by the TSE. They have no legal power to ask for a foreign election observer's TSE accreditation documents. The only thing they can legally ask someone to produce is their passport or other immigration documents that identify them and authorize them to be in the country.

Then on Saturday, November 23, military police entered the Aurora Hotel in Tegucigalpa, and ordered everyone in the hotel to leave their rooms, interrupting a meeting of LIBRE activist Eduardo Enrique Reina with his duly assigned and accredited foreign election observers. All were asked to identify themselves and were threatened with explusion from the country.

That was too much for David Matamoros, president of the TSE, who ordered Immigration to stop following and harassing foreigners, saying

They told me they were following two people who had entered the country 10 days ago, but at this moment we cannot have any discussion of the act of going to a place where we have invited foreigners, because we must maintain the image of openness, the image of peace and tranquility which we want to have, not only for the Hondurans, but also for the international observers.

Matamoros says he went directly to President Lobo Sosa to ask that Immigration, which is part of the executive branch, be ordered to cease its operations following foreigners in the country. Matamoros also issued instructions to the police and Armed Forces pointing out that they, in support of the election, were supposed to protect, not harass, election observers.

Friday, November 22, 2013

The OAS got a chance earlier this month to see a snapshot of the Sistema Integrado de Escrutinio y Divulgación Electoral (SIEDE). They found the system worked-- sort of. Citing "poor performance" in key steps, the OAS reports that Honduras still needs to finish the last bits of code to ensure "verification of results".

The report is an audit of the software that's going to be used to count votes for things like security, accuracy, transparency. El Heraldo posted the PDF of the report here.

SIEDE is designed to do the following tasks. First it scans the vote
tally sheets, printing copies for each of the political parties, and
then it digitally signs them and sends them via HTTPS to the Tribunal Supremo Electoral's (TSE) data
center in Tegucigalpa over a cell phone network. Computers in the data center receive the scanned tally sheets
and verify the digital signature, forwarding copies to the political
parties and the international auditors, then analyze the internal
consistency of the transmitted tally sheet. Next the data center
computers transcribe the tally sheet using Optical Character Recognition
software and verify the data on the tally sheet, monitoring it for
inconsistencies. Finally SIEDE, in the TSE data center, accumulates and
integrates the votes from this tally sheet with others already entered
into the system, generating vote totals and sharing the results.

SIEDE is a combination of off-the-shelf hardware and software, some of it from vendors, some written for the TSE.

The hardware at each polling place consists of a laptop, wireless modem for the wireless network of CLARO or TIGO (two of the large phone companies in the country), and a multifunction ink-jet printer and scanner. Each polling place runs software which will digitally sign, then upload, the completed vote tallies for President, Congress, and Municipal office to an off-site data center in a hotel, set up by the Tribunal Supremo Electoral. The data center has systems that act as web servers to receive the signed tally sheet images over HTTPS, in a Microsoft SQL Server database to store the images and record information about their processing, and Readiris OCR software to read the numbers from the scanned forms for later validation and processing.

All of this commercial software is held together both in the polling station and the data center by automation code written by TSE programmers.

During the one month audit period, the OAS observers got to witness three tests of the SIEDE system by the TSE, each with increasing load. The audit was complete on November 20 with the release of the report.

Key findings are the following:

The findings refer, fundamentally, to the behavior of the system during the simulations, which were carried out without all of the functionality and with test data that was smaller than the defined objectives for this audit. For that reason, the conclusions refer to the behavior of the system as of the dates mentioned without a possibility to predict its behavior with the volumes of information and expected loads on election day...

In general terms, and under the technical functional conditions observed, the operational modules that bind the system together are functional, complying with the established parameters of the SIEDE process. But, because of the gaps in the load testing during the simulations and that the system must process on election day, the part that consolidates and integrates, and discloses the data is of special concern [since in each simulation] we saw poor performance in the systems that accumulate the results and schedule tasks. Because of this it is a priority to optimize the mechanisms used in the processing of the information and to finish the code to do the work of verification of the results.

Now, there is much the TSE deserves credit for here. Building this kind of voting system in-house, from scratch, to international standards is admirable, and from the OAS checklist, many of the parts they completed they did well, and the OAS had few concerns about much of the completed code. But the TSE wrote no specifications detailing how the software should behave, and was slow to purchase the hardware and software on which to build the standardized infrastructure. That makes it difficult to say the say the system is doing what it should, since there are no specifications to check it against.

The OAS found the code for everything up to tallying the results and sharing them with the political parties to be up to international standards, and that each stage to that point provided correct and verifiable results to pass along to the next.

But that's where their praise stopped.

In relation to the module that consolidates, integrates, and shares the results, the audit detected failures that gave evidence of a failure to follow international standards of quality required for this type of program. It is important to note that aspects like correction, trustworthiness, and efficiency have not been complied with in these modules up to the finalization of the simulations.

Translation? The code that counts the votes and accumulates the results and then shares them with the political parties, is incomplete, nor does what is there meet the international quality standards the OAS deems ordinary and proper for this kind of code.

To be eight days out from the election and not code complete is asking for trouble. The OAS indicating that changes to the existing code base still needed to be made before the election is also asking for trouble.

I managed enterprise level software projects of comparable complexity in a former career, and I can tell you you don't make these kinds of major, unproven, changes to a system in the last 8 days before you roll it out unless rolling it out as it is will be a certain disaster. Why? Because you're inviting things to go horribly wrong by making late changes, and they almost always do.

There is one last simulation scheduled for November 23, the day before the election, and it is supposed to be a full scale load test. If anything goes wrong, there won't really be any time to fix things.

Luckily the TSE has 30 days to declare the winner, just enough time to do a hand count of the ballots if necessary.